Method and system for advertising and managing one or more vacation rental properties worldwide via a network

Abstract

A method and system for finding, browsing, managing, booking, rating and advertising vacation rental properties worldwide via a network such as the Internet composed of a renter reservation system, an owner management system and a plurality affiliates or publishers of Internet content established to provide goods and / or services to prospective renters and / or vacation rental property owners and works in a client / server environment by receiving, storing and tracking data associated with a vacation rental property owner, the vacation rental property itself, reservation and guest information and rental property listing click-throughs from a client system and assigns a unique identifier to each in a centralized relational database.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is entitled to the benefit of Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60 / 718,934 filed Sep. 19, 2005.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Field of Invention[0003]The field of this invention is advertising, browsing, managing and booking vacation rental properties worldwide using electronic means of (a) communications, (b) data storage and retrieval, (c) online reservations, (d) transfers of payments, and (e) providing customer service.[0004]These days in the travel business, the trend is for vacationers to do all their planning online, and as the vacation rental business grows (4 out of 10 homes sold in 2005 were second homes), it needs to keep up with the latest trends in technology. Online availability calendars, up-to-date rates and online bookings are three important things renters want when dealing with vacation rental properties.[0005]A complete system is disclosed, a method and system that meets the needs of today's...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

The exposure of the owner's rental property to prospective renters is therefore left to the direction of the management company and is limited on a per-property basis because said management company has no vested interest in any single property.

With respect to a renter, reserving a vacation rental is often a difficult task which may include multiple steps and involve a great deal of time.

Even with the expansion of the Internet, the searching process is slow and cumbersome.

All the vacation rental properties in a community or region may be spread across several disparate ILS websites and without a centralized database there is a high likelihood of double booking.

These, and other difficulties, create undesirable delays and frustrations for vacation rental property renters and owners, and may reduce the ability for property managers to attract renters and increase occupancy rates.

Many of these features and functionalities have been unavailable due to the difficulty of aggregating data from disparate, often antiquated, property management computer systems.

Moreover, there is no established way of screening prospective renters.

Furthermore, when a vacationer actually finds a vacation rental property matching their needs, there remains the task of payment resulting from the vacationers lease obligations and the like.

Because each vacation rental property is like a separate business entity, each with its own method of accepting and processing payments and refunds (for security deposit refunds for example), there is no universal method of booking and payment for renters of vacation rental properties.

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